Linux

Home Assistant is an open source home automation platform, written in Python, which I have been running it for several years for various tasks.

I am running it using a less common method (called Home Assistant Core), which will soon not be recommended nor supported for end users. However, I have consciously decided to run it that way, rather than use a docker container, Home Assistant OS, or the other recommended versions.

These reasons for this decision include:

In recent long term support (LTS) releases of Ubuntu, Canonical has been adding more and more packages that are installed using snapd.

Snapd is a package manager that relies on static linking of dependencies, contrary to over two decades of Linux managing dependencies via dynamic linking, with Debian being the pioneer of this approach.

A few months ago, Ubuntu started pushing ads for their Ubuntu Pro service to the command line interface apt command. When you run the apt command from the terminal, you see this message:

Try Ubuntu Pro beta with a free personal subscription on up to 5 machines. Learn more at https://ubuntu.com/pro

Then about a week ago, more messages were pushed about the ESM service saying that more packages that can be upgraded if you subscribe to that service.

The following is a list of talks and presentation that I have done on various topics.

They are sorted by the most recent first.

For over a decade, I was running my home server on a trusty AMD Athlon II X4 PC, without any issues.

After upgrading to a newer motherboard the retired one was left unpowered for several months. Then when powering it up, Linux would not boot on it no matter what I tried.

Various distros were attempted, including Xubuntu desktop, and Finnix (highly recommended for testing and troubleshooting from the command line). The symptoms were the same: the PC reads the media, then the screen flickers and goes black with nothing on it.

Home Assistant is an open source home automation platform, written in Python. I have been running it for several years for various tasks.

However, I am running it using a less common Home Assistant Core installation method, consciously deciding not to run the custom Raspberry Pi image for Home Assistant, nor the docker container version for many reasons.

These reasons include:

Years ago, I wrote about using syslog-ng on OpenWRT for logging.

Times have change, and OpenWRT has evolved. With the current stable version (19.07.3), syslog-ng is no longer the preferred method. Instead, I have found that rsyslog works better. In this article, I describe how to install and configure rsyslog.

If you have been experiencing audio skips or stuttering on a Raspberry Pi, then I may have a solution for you.

For background, I use an older Raspberry Pi as an audio player, using mpd as an audio server, MPD Remote on my Android Phone, and Sonata on my Xubuntu Laptop.

It was working fine for a long time, but then it started skipping audio every 10 or 20 seconds, regularly.

Yesterday, I gave a talk for the KWLUG on Incremental Backup For Linux. This is targeted towards home networks or small businesses using Linux, although I touched a bit on some enterprise considerations and technologies.

The solution I use relies on the dump and restore utilities for the ext4 filesystem, along with rsync from laptops.

The slides are attached below, as PDF. The meeting was recorded, and the video should appear here shortly.

If you want to use the Arduino IDE for STM32F103 boards, you need to do the following.

The instructions are for Linux, but it is just downloading, extracting and renaming, so you can use similar steps for Windows of Mac OS/X.

Install the Arduino IDE

First, go to the Arduino web site

Select your platform, and download

Extract the IDE

tar xJvf ~/Desktop/arduino-1.8.5-linux64.tar.xz

Rename the directory